David Limbaugh chronicles the reasons for the freefall.
David Limbaugh has a solid track record of writing comprehensive, damning indictments. He’s gone after Janet Reno’s Justice Department. He’s exposed domestic crimes against religious freedom. Now, he has written Crimes against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama. The full brief is still, of course, a work in progress, but Limbaugh’s timely, hot-off-the-deadline book comes just in time for the final stretch to the November elections -- just in time to limit the damage. He talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about what has been done and what can still be done.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is Crimes against Liberty a little bit of an I-told-you-so?
DAVID LIMBAUGH: I suppose you could say that, though I don’t derive any pleasure from having accurately discerned Mr. Obama’s character and ideology during the campaign. Many of those who didn’t were permitting themselves to be blinded by fantastic hopes of deliverance from times that, in retrospect, were not as terrible as many claimed. Moreover, as much as I and countless others predicted this national nightmare, Obama has actually been worse, both personally and in terms of his agenda, than most of us anticipated.
The greatest challenge in writing this book was finally putting it to bed, as our president was steadily committing new outrages. I was adding new material every day, but eventually the printer refused any further additions. Still, in the end, I trust readers will find the book remarkably up to date, as both my publisher -- Regnery -- and the printer were quite accommodating.
LOPEZ: You were calling him a threat to liberty before he was elected, never mind inaugurated. What accounts for his “popularity freefall” now? Did people have to see him in action to believe it?
LIMBAUGH: A couple of things account for his plummeting popularity. First, Obama’s agenda has been far more extreme than naïve well-wishers assumed it would be. Second, his policies have already had disastrous results, which he can no longer credibly pawn off on his predecessor. And third, he has flagrantly thwarted the will of the people in foisting his policies upon us through abuses of power, legislative trickery, unseemly, unethical deals, and worse. He has acted decidedly un-presidential in slandering and bullying his opponents, has repeatedly played the race card, and has misrepresented his signature legislation for all to see. Even some of the conservatives who decided to hitch their wagon to him admitted at the outset they simply hoped he wouldn’t govern according to his leftist ideology. What gave them this hope is beyond rational comprehension, but surely most of them have now seen the light. In fact, it’s remarkable that Obama has any significant support at all. I daresay that most of his remaining supporters are probably among those not “contributing” income taxes to our general revenues.
LOPEZ: What’s a “Crime against Liberty”? Surely President Obama hasn’t done anything illegal.
LIMBAUGH: I am speaking more figuratively. I am neither accusing President Obama of having committed high crimes and misdemeanors nor advocating his impeachment. Many of us were preoccupied with such pursuits during the Clinton high-crimes era, for which I don’t apologize. But I’d rather focus on the more realistic goal of alerting people to Obama’s egregious personal behavior and policies as we try to turn this nation around in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Having said this, intellectual honesty compels me to confess that some of Obama’s audacious and shocking abuses of power could arguably constitute impeachable offenses were we less apathetic about the Constitution and the rule of law, but I am certainly not advocating going there, if for no other reason than it would likely backfire and enhance Obama’s popularity as a sympathetic victim. One example is his pledging of $140 billion to the IMF not only without executive authority, but in contravention of legislative directives. Another is his four cabinet secretaries’ sending simultaneous letters to Arizona senator Jon Kyl threatening to cut off Arizona’s stimulus funds because Kyl suggested that Obama freeze stimulus spending due to the failure of stimulus money to stimulate anything besides debt. This is incredibly abusive stuff -- an administration threatening to withhold federal money to punish an entire state because one of its senators expressed an opinion they deemed critical. This is what I mean by “Crimes against Liberty” -- it refers to Obama’s policies and actions that are systematically undermining our liberties, to his bankrupting the nation, and to his undermining our national security. The book abounds with further examples.
LOPEZ: What was his ultimate Crime against Liberty?
LIMBAUGH: At this point -- and the list of infractions expands daily -- it seems to be a toss-up between the unapologetic bankrupting of the federal government and the imposition of a universal health-care system that represents a systemic cancer on our liberties, not to mention our medical system and our treasury.
LOPEZ: Are there some crimes against truth? Like the idea that he is some kind of post-racial figure?
LIMBAUGH: There are two separate chapters specifically chronicling Obama’s pattern of deceit. Chapter Two details his fundamental misrepresentations to the electorate about who he is and what he stands for -- a complete fraud in the inducement -- and Chapter Three examines the specific lies he’s told and other deceits he’s engaged in concerning the various aspects of his policy agenda. Even well-informed readers will be shocked at the sheer volume of his lies, for which I can’t think of an acceptable euphemism.
LOPEZ: You wrote a book on Janet Reno’s Justice Department, indicting it for a “legacy” of “corruption.” How does Eric Holder’s compare thus far?
LIMBAUGH: It’s difficult to compare, but Holder’s Justice Department is, like Reno’s, highly politicized. The most striking example is probably the dismissal of the already-won case against New Black Panther party members for voter intimidation purely for reasons of politics and race. Disclosures from former DOJ insiders reveal that this DOJ has adopted the unwritten policy of not prosecuting alleged civil-rights abuses by minorities against whites -- an enormously disturbing development for those who believe in equal protection under the law. But there are many equally shocking cases. Did you know there is a “blog squad” inside the DOJ, monitoring the Internet for political opposition and posting comments favorable to the administration -- all on the taxpayer’s dime? And please don’t get me started on Obama and Holder’s approach to the War on Terror, including Mirandizing enemy combatants on the battlefield. That is so ridiculous I thought the story came from [the parody site] Scrappleface the first time I read it.
LOPEZ: Why was he “almost willing to jeopardize his sacred Obamacare over his extreme pro-abortion views”?
LIMBAUGH: For a while, it looked like the Obamacare bill would fail due to Obama’s refusal to meet Bart Stupak’s demand that the bill ban federal funding for abortion. But it’s possible that’s an overstatement, because it might well be that Obama knew the whole time that Stupak would cave, or perhaps Obama planned to cave if Stupak didn’t. As it turns out, they both cynically pretended to cave -- Obama by issuing an unenforceable executive order prohibiting federal funding for abortion, and Stupak by agreeing to vote for Obamacare in exchange for that meaningless order. But the bottom line is that Obama is an irrepressible ideologue, as to both his extreme pro-abortion views and his dogged determination to force nationalized health care on a resistant American citizenry.
LOPEZ: Will Barack Obama pay a price if he does not deliver more to the Left on these social issues? His position on marriage, for instance, is so incomprehensible that not even David Axelrod has successfully or comfortably spun it.
LIMBAUGH: Obama’s position on marriage is brazenly cynical. First and foremost, he couldn’t be more supportive of the radical homosexual agenda. He doesn’t openly admit that, but everyone knows where he really stands and that he will do everything in his power to promote that agenda through Alinskyite strategies. He simply knows that to acknowledge his real goals would be counterproductive. I doubt he’ll pay a price from the Left for anything he does, if by “price” you mean at the polls. The Left have nowhere to go. They certainly can’t afford to support any opponents of Obama, and they know it. They’re just bellyaching and causing him angst -- which is mildly amusing, but ultimately insignificant.
LOPEZ: Why is Gitmo still open?
LIMBAUGH: Because it has to be. Obama vastly underestimated the complexity of closing Gitmo and relocating these dangerous jihadists. It’s a marvelous display of the disconnect between his skills as a campaigner and his incompetence as a leader, not to mention his self-absorption -- making such an expansive promise without, apparently, giving the slightest consideration to whether and how he could fulfil it.
LOPEZ: Is his treatment of Israel a Crime against Liberty?
LIMBAUGH: Yes, and shamefully so. It’s still shocking to me that we haven’t seen a bigger backlash from the Jewish community, though former New York City mayor Ed Koch wrote a few stinging pieces calling out Jewish politicians, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, for remaining silent in the face of Obama’s utter mistreatment of the Jewish state, and Schumer finally responded.
Those who closely watched the campaign should not be surprised by Obama’s hostility toward Israel, given his relations with pro-Palestinian, virulent critics of Israel and his voluntary membership in Reverend Wright’s decidedly anti-Semitic church. Furthermore, his campaign website featured anti-Semitic posts. One of them, titled “How the Jewish Lobby Works,” argued that “no lobby is more feared or catered to by politicians.” It’s not sufficient to say Obama didn’t endorse the posts. How did people of such prejudices have access to his own campaign website?
So as a candidate, he was already bad on Israel; but in office, he’s been even worse than I anticipated. He began by appointing James Jones, hardly a friend of Israel, as his national-security adviser. And from the beginning, his foreign-policy team has worked to impose a “solution” on Israel. He has also been ambiguous about whether he would honor George W. Bush’s promise to Israel that the Jewish state would retain sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria that have large Jewish majorities. He has tied our efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions -- one of our most pressing national-security challenges -- first to Israel’s evacuating West Bank settlements, and then to Israel’s acquiescence to a Palestinian state. He presided over the United States’s return to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the U.S. had left nine months earlier because the council obsessively demeans Israel while overlooking the daily, horrific abuses of Mideast dictatorships.
Obama also cancelled a scheduled meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and announced he would end the Bush tradition of hosting Israeli prime ministers when they were in Washington. His State Department demanded that Israel negotiate with Syria -- a primary sponsor of Hezbollah -- just two days after Syrian foreign minister Walid Mualler praised an inflammatory speech by Ahmadinejad calling Israel “the most cruel and repressive racist regime.” Obama’s Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, doing Obama’s bidding, adopted the controversial 2002 Arab peace initiative, which called for Israel not only to withdraw from Eastern Jerusalem, the entire West Bank, and the Golan Heights, but also to accept the influx of millions of foreign Arabs as Israeli citizens as part of the so-called “right of return.”
What do the Israelis get in return for these alarming concessions? The Arab world will promise to be peaceful toward it. But that’s entirely moot, because after all those concessions there will be no more Israel; as Caroline Glick notes, the “right of return” would mean “Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state.”
And of course, I should mention the bizarre U.S. demand that Israel stop building homes in parts of its own capital of Jerusalem, and Vice President Biden’s harsh, direct “condemnation” of Israel for defying Obama’s dictates on this score. Suffice it to say that this type of heated denunciation of an ally -- for a municipal zoning decision, no less, and for acting within its sovereign authority -- is highly unusual, if not unprecedented.
LOPEZ: What are “Crimes against Statesmanship”? Do they simply amount to not actually being a statesman?
LIMBAUGH: This is the second half of the title for Chapter Two: “The Narcissist: Crimes against Statesmanship.” Unfortunately, our worst fears about Obama’s narcissism have been validated, as he has demonstrated most of the traits of a clinical narcissist. His enormous opinion of himself, his arrogance, his inability to withstand criticism and his lashing out at his critics, and his delusions of grandeur translate into Obama’s governing on behalf not of the American people or the national interest, but on behalf of Obama himself -- and his obsessive quest to fundamentally change the nation. Obama’s personality traits, coupled with his extreme-leftist agenda, make him particularly dangerous to the American ideal and to the preservation of our founding principles, as well as to the liberty and prosperity they guarantee. His narcissism contributes to his imperviousness to counterarguments and empirical evidence of the failure of his prescriptions, his hostility to his critics, and his utter lack of empathy as he drives America over the financial cliff.
LOPEZ: What do you mean by “Obama Mostly Hears Obama”?
LIMBAUGH: Liberals hold themselves out as being open-minded and responsive to the will of the people, such as with Hillary Clinton’s vaunted -- but completely phony -- listening tour. In fact, Obama couldn’t be less interested in the will of the people, as he showed in the deplorable way he crammed Obamacare down Americans’ throats. On the heels of passing that widely reviled monstrosity, he boasted that he had just achieved a victory for the American people and vowed to continue to work for us, which was as surreal as it was insulting. Following Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate election, which was a direct repudiation of Obama’s agenda, many expected Obama to show some contrition in the State of the Union Speech and promise to modify his bill to accommodate people’s concerns. Instead, he said he wanted the American people to take another look at his plan. Sarah Palin put it best when she said, “Instead of sensibly telling the American people, ‘I’m listening,’ the president is saying, ‘Listen up, people!’”
LOPEZ: Why do you call him the “Commissar”? You know he never wanted to run GM, don’t you?
LIMBAUGH: That title refers to his seizing control over executive salaries, and his cram-down of a restructuring scheme for both GM and Chrysler that ripped off many secured creditors while favoring unsecured creditors who happened to be Obama’s union friends. When he couldn’t get all of Chrysler’s secured creditors to roll over, he publicly slandered them as greedy speculators who had received bailouts but weren’t willing to sacrifice for the public good. His surrogates threatened to ruin the reputation of these creditors, who were merely asserting their legal rights. Michael Barone aptly referred to these sordid events as an example of “gangster government.”
And we can’t overlook Obama’s recklessly wasteful and arbitrary spending of stimulus funds, nor his effort to preclude the repayment of TARP money, because his Keynesian indoctrination compelled him to believe that the money needed to remain in the system to generate growth. With no authority under the Constitution or anywhere else, he attempted to delay those repayments, and then to divert some of the money that was repaid, prompting Judd Gregg to remind the administration that it had no authority for its actions and that “TARP is not a piggy bank.”
LOPEZ: You write that Barack Obama has “demonized anyone to the political right of Ted Kennedy.” Is that entirely true? Hasn’t he, for instance, taken Paul Ryan seriously?
LIMBAUGH: Obamahas pretended to respect Paul Ryan, but did you see his palpably irate expression during the health-care summit as Ryan took him to school on the numbers? With virtually every part of his agenda, Obama has vilified certain groups in order to avoid debate on the substantive issue at hand -- health care, financial reform -- and make the issue about his particular scapegoat of the day. Whether it’s defaming financial institutions as “fat-cat bankers,” insurers as making “obscene profits,” physicians as greedy and immoral, or President Bush as responsible for every imaginable sin -- or lashing out at Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Jim Cramer, Jim Santelli, the Supreme Court, or British Petroleum -- Obama has outdone himself in thuggish, Chicago-style politics. This behavior is wholly unbecoming of a president.
LOPEZ: Which of President Obama’s Crimes against Liberty should Democrats have to answer for in November? If Republican candidates would listen to your advice in this regard, how would you counsel them?
LIMBAUGH: I believe not only that Democrats should have to answer for every one of Obama’s Crimes against Liberty in November, but also that they most emphatically will. They have enabled him in every particular and should be held accountable at the ballot box. Many of us conservatives have warned of what liberals would do with virtually unchecked power, and we have been vindicated. In almost every case, the overwhelming majority of Democrats in government have enabled his recklessly destructive agenda.
Thus my advice to Republicans is to stick to their guns, to adhere to conservative principles unapologetically. They must not lose courage and listen to the faint of heart or move toward the center in a phony and cynical effort to appeal to so-called independents. Independents are already flocking away from Obama in droves. They just need somewhere to go, and that somewhere is not mushy moderation and uncertainty and vacillation. Statecraft isn’t rocket science, and we know that we need much smaller government and an unleashing of the private sector.
At this point, we need a radical rollback of the statist agenda. We must reform entitlements, which were on the path to bankrupt this nation eventually even before Obama came along. Democrats will demagogue any efforts to reform as they always do when Republicans are in office or on the ascendancy, but we must plow forward. I say to moderates that we no longer have the luxury of moderating our prescriptions on domestic policy. Unless we greatly reduce our tax burden while also seriously reducing our discretionary and “mandatory” spending, we won’t be enjoying growth and prosperity. We have no choice but to reverse the present course.
The good news is that the public is waiting to hear this kind of message. The tea-party movement is a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon, not an astroturf hoax. We need inspired leadership to carry forward the grassroots agenda. If we do not present a principled message of less government across the board -- including repealing, not just modifying, Obamacare -- we will lose the momentum we have as we dispirit the American people, who are relying on principled conservatives to implement their agenda.
-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large of National Review Online.
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